Five theater companies dominated with multiple nominations. The Arvada Center, Buntport Theater Company, Curious Theatre Company, the Denver Center Theatre Company and Town Hall Arts Center in Littleton are vying for Outstanding Season for a Theater Company.

Boulder’s Dinner Theatre, Vintage Theatre Company and the Creede Repertory Theatre also had multiple nominees among the 20 categories.

Voted on by a group of 30 Colorado theater reporters, reviewers and appointed judges, the nominations cover the 2011-2012 season. Local audiences still have a window, albeit a very tight one, to see four productions that garnered multiple nominations.

Nominated for Oustanding Producion of a Musical, “The Producers” is onstage at the Town Hall Arts Center in Littleton through Sunday. Robert Wells is was nominated for Best Direction of a Musical and Kelly Kates for Outstanding Choreography.

“Red” is onstage at the Curious Theatre Company’s home in Denver’s Golden Triangle neighborhood. John Logan’s Tony Award-winning drama about painter Mark Rothko was nominated for Outstanding Production of a Play, Christy Montour-Larson for Outstanding Direction of a Play, Lawrence Hecht for Outstanding Actor in a Play for his portrayal of Rothko, Benjamin Bonenfant for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Play for his turn as Rothko’s assistant, Outstanding Ensemble Performance, Outstanding Sound Design, Outstanding Lighting Design, and Outstanding Scenic Design. “Red’ ends Saturday.

A few blocks southwest, the Buntport Theater Company is staging the nimble farce “The Roast Beef Situation”. Written collaboratively, the play recounts the story of clown/actor/dancer Carlo Delpini, who was imprisoned in 1787 for uttering two words onstage without musical accompaniment. In addition to Outstanding Ensemble Performance and Outstanding New Play, the crazed clown tale received four other nominations. “The Roast Beef Situation” ends Saturday. Later in the month, Buntport reprises for three nights of fundraising, the five-time nominated puppet play “Tommy Lee Jones Goes to the Opera Alone.”

Henry Award winners will be announced during a July 16 ceremony at the L2 Arts & Culture Center near the Lowenstein culture-plex on east Colfax Avenue. The awards were named for theater producer Henry Lowenstein.

In addition to this year’s nominees, the guild will bestow three special awards. The Lifetime Achievement Award will be presented to Tom McNally, Professor of Theatre Arts at the University of Northern Colorado. The Denver Center’s National Theatre Conservatory, which recently shuttered its graduate program, will be recognized. John Moore, the Denver Post’s longtime, intrepid, discerning theater critic, will receive the Guild’s inaugural Journalistic Excellence in the Arts award.

Film & theater critic Lisa Kennedy likes to watch -- a lot. She also has a fondness for no-man’s lands, contested territories and Venn Diagrams. She believes the best place to live is usually on the border between two vibrant neighborhoods. Where better to apply this penchant for overlap and divergence than covering film and theater – two arts that owe so much to each other yet offer radically idiosyncratic pleasures? In another life, Kennedy was an Obie judge. In this one, she’s been a Pulitzer Prize judge in criticism, an Independent Spirit Award jurist and Colorado’s first member of the National Society of Film Critics.

More than a mash-up of the Running Lines and Diary of a Madmoviergoer blogs, Stage, Screen & In Between offers engaged takes on Colorado theater and film and pointed views on news from both coasts and both industries. Culture lovers, add your voices. Culture-makers, share your production journal entries and photos.